What I thought was going to be OMGSHTF food storage is actually just a normally stocked pantry that we eat from daily. Everything has it's own row or two, and if there are supposed to be 8 cans there, and we see 5, we pick up 3 at the store that week. It's super easy.

Way easier than having a crazy bunker full of stuff you never use, and have to keep track of over time.

Let us suppose there is just one person. All we are doing is addressing canned food. No other food.

So you go to the supermarket and for just one day, you buy a can of tuna or beef stew, a can of vegetables and a can of fruit like fruit cocktail.

I don't purport to represent that this represents enough calories. It is also way less than you probably eat in a day.

Ok, so you buy a second can of vegetables and a second can of fruit and they are different from your previous choices.

What do these choices have in common?
1. you don't apply apply heat;
2. you don't have to do much cleanup if any;
3. you don't attract people with cooking smells;
4. you have fairly secure storage from insects and rodents.
5. you don't have to worry that you opened super big cost saving can of an item that you will not be able to eat in a meal.

So just for one person you have 30 cans of tuna or stew, 60 cans of vegetables and 60 cans of fruit for just one month.

I am not going into the communal thing of baking bread, having big pots of stew and so forth.

If shtf, you aren't going to using gi mess kits. They were discontinued because guys in the field got the ****s.

You use canned foods and plastic table ware.

The foregoing is written for members who may be:
1. urban;
2. physically handicapped;
3. are on meds because of diabetes;
4. have kids they are raising;
5. are over the age of 40 years;
or
6. don't belong to a gym and regularly exercise.

The foregoing does not apply to:
1. hermits;
2. guys who think that they will live off the land for free;
3. guys who think that their legal ownership of a plot of land will discourage people from invading their space;
4. guys who just watched a Rambo movie and take steroids.

In the 1980s I took a deposition of a guy who said that he used to run for miles every day and was not running after he received a suggestion that he had asbestosis. Then I asked the next question: "Isn't it true that the last time you ran miles every day was in 1946 when you were a paratrooper?" "Yes" was the response. Don't kid yourself.

Shtf is not fun. Imagine the worst illness or surgery you ever had and your recovery. You wanted just to eat out of a can with a pop top. You didn't have the strength to cleanup or prepare food. If you choose your canned food with this perspective and store enough for 30 days for each person, you are going to be way up the food chain.

You don't have to worry about rotation. There are many clear plastic large containers on the market. You put your canned food in clear plastic containers. You also put in a large, computer generated printout on a piece of 8x11 paper specifying the date that you bought the items. Then, you stack the plastic containers. Man, this beats putting in rolling cabinets and worrying about recycling. You always know what you have and when you purchased it.
Clear plastic containers come in various sizes and strengths. Make life easy on yourself. Don't put 40 pounds of canned food in one clear plastic container.

I disagree on rotation, especially if money isn't unlimited. Most canned stuff isn't going to go 10-20 years safely or keep its taste. No sense letting it go to waste. Plus if you like it during good times you will LOVE it during bad.

Be advised, in a resent study, processed meats like spam, even hickory smoked, have shown a strong link to diabetes. This breaks my heart as I love spam. The less processed the better is the take away point from this.

In an extended SHTF situation, your main focus, and I do mean your MAIN focus, is calories. You should have at least a couple month's of multivitamins on hand simply because they come in big bottles and you only need one a day. those suppliment a lot of the things you need for proper nourishment, but there is no way to suppliment your calories.

Yes, eventually you're going to need fruits and vegetables, they're good to have or find. But problem #1 is having the calories to function. Meat has more calories, plain and simply. Corned beef hash, Spam, things like that have more calories, probably at least 600ish total. Thats going to be gold, whereas that can of Green Beans has maybe 100 calories total?

I find the chefboyardee stuffed italian sausage ravioli make a good meal in a can. Buck a pop this time of the year, a lot tastier now than they were when i was a kid, contains some meat and starch, the sauce flavor is not bad at all, can be eaten cold in a pinch. Easy to stack and inventory. A pleasant look-forward-to, not just for kids either!

What I thought was going to be OMGSHTF food storage is actually just a normally stocked pantry that we eat from daily. Everything has it's own row or two, and if there are supposed to be 8 cans there, and we see 5, we pick up 3 at the store that week. It's super easy.

Way easier than having a crazy bunker full of stuff you never use, and have to keep track of over time.

I do the same thing. Granted I buy some canned stuff that my family doesn't eat a lot and may go to waste like spam(I'll only eat it if I'm in the mood or drunk), canned tomato sauce (Not that tasty , but last a lot longer then jar sauce), and B&M canned bread, but its all a small precentage of my total pantry.

I do the same thing. Granted I buy some canned stuff that my family doesn't eat a lot and may go to waste like spam(I'll only eat it if I'm in the mood or drunk), canned tomato sauce (Not that tasty , but last a lot longer then jar sauce), and B&M canned bread, but its all a small precentage of my total pantry.

Disagree with what I checked above.Glass jars resist the acidity of the tomatoes better than cans do.I've got 8+yo jars and I've had ta throw away cans that have failed.'08.

By the way - I purchased some canned cranberries on sale after Thanksgiving, and upon reviewing the nutritional value determined they have basically no nutritional value! I think the only reason they even have any calories is they add corn syrup. Not really worth stocking up on those!

I also wanted to go with can food because I was reading that can food can go far beyond the expiration date on the can as long as the can is not swollen and it smells fine. Can someone confirm or deny this. Thanks.

Adam

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing (Edmund Burke)